Anthony Horowitz - Evil Star

Matt had it in his pocket. He took it out and gave it to her. She read it briefly once, then again. “Well, some of this is fairly straightforward,” she said. “The place of Qolqa. Inti Raymi, that’s only two days from now. Doesn’t leave us a lot of time. I’m not sure about this white bird, though. It could be a condor, I suppose…”

“What about a swan?” Matt said.

“A swan? What makes you think of that?”

“I heard Salamanda talking about a swan,” he explained. He could have mentioned his dream but decided not to. “He said it’s to be in position. At midnight.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Professor Chambers had irritated Matt and she saw it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that it seems so unlikely. There’s a condor and a hummingbird in the Nazca Desert. You saw them this morning. But there’s no swan. As far as I know, there are no swans in Peru.”

“That’s what he said,” Matt insisted.

“What about the rest of the poem?” Richard asked.

“Well, the whole page refers to the Nazca Lines. There’s no doubt about that. The place of Qolqa, for example…” She stopped herself. “There’s no point talking about the Nazca Lines until you know what they are, so I’m going to give you a history lesson after all. It would take me a week to describe them to you, and even then I would only scratch the surface. But we don’t have a week. And anyway, young people these days have no concentration. So let me try and put it as simply as I can.”

Professor Chambers got up and helped herself to another beer, flicking the cap off with a penknife. Matt was almost surprised that she didn’t use her teeth.

“There are many mysteries in the world,” she began. “Even now, in the twenty-first century. Stonehenge. The Pyramids. Uluru, in Australia. There are all sorts of places and things – some of them man-made, some of them natural – that science can’t explain. But if you ask me, the Nazca Lines are the biggest mystery of the lot.

“Let’s start with the Nazca Desert. It’s huge. It’s hot. And it’s empty. About two thousand years ago, the ancient Indians of Nazca decided to trudge out here and draw a series of extraordinary pictures in the ground. They did this by removing the darker stones from the surface of the desert and exposing the lighter soil underneath. There’s almost no rain in Nazca and very little wind. That’s how the lines have survived.

“Are you with me so far?” She glanced at Atoc, who was translating rapidly for Pedro. He nodded.

“Good. Well, some of these pictures are very beautiful. You saw them from the plane. There are animals – a whale, a condor, a monkey, a hummingbird and a huge spider. And there are triangles, spirals and star shapes, as well as hundreds of perfectly straight lines, some of them stretching for up to twenty-five miles.”

She took a quick swig of beer.

“Now, this is where the mystery begins. The Nazca Lines can only be seen from the air! In fact, they were only discovered in 1927 when one of the first aeroplanes in Peru flew over them. I wish I’d been on board, that’s all I can say! Anyway, obviously the Nazcan people didn’t have planes. So the question is – why go to all the trouble of making the lines and the pictures if they’d never be able to see them?

“There have been all sorts of theories,” Professor Chambers went on. “One writer believed that the lines were some sort of airport for spaceships from another planet. It’s true that one of the pictures does show a man with a round head and some people believe it to be an astronaut. A lot of people think they were drawn for the benefit of the ancient gods. They would be up in the sky, so they’d be able to see them. My own feeling has always been that they are in some way connected to the stars… perhaps they were used to forecast stars. Or perhaps…” She paused. “I’ve often wondered if they weren’t put there to warn us about something.”

Her cigar glowed red. Smoke crept up the side of her face. She seemed to be deep in thought. But then, abruptly, she sat down again.

“Many theories. But the point is – nobody knows for sure.”

“Is the place of Qolqa in the desert?” Matt said.

“Yes, it is.” Professor Chambers nodded. “Once again, you should have seen it from the plane. Qolqa is a word in Quechua, the ancient language of Peru. It means ‘granary’. And it’s the name given to the great rectangle we flew over this morning.”

“Before the place of Qolqa…” Matt read out the second line of the poem. “That means the gate must be in front of the rectangle!”

“It may not mean anything of the sort!” the professor snapped. “There is no gate in the desert. That is to say, there are no standing stones, no markers, no buildings. There’s just the earth and the lines.”

“But there’s a platform,” Matt returned. “Salamanda said he needed to find the platform.”

“Well, good luck to him. I’ve been into the desert a thousand times and I’ve never seen a platform.” Professor Chambers tapped ash into a saucer on the table. “Mind you, it could be buried,” she muttered. “I suppose that’s always a possibility.”

“Are you sure there’s no swan?” Richard asked.

The professor slammed down her cigar, extinguishing it. “Mr Cole!” she exclaimed. “The day I began studying the Nazca Lines, you were still in nappies. How dare you suggest…?”

Matt thought she was going to throw something at the journalist, but she forced herself to calm down.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But you have to understand. The Nazca Lines are my life, which is to say, I’ve devoted my whole life to them. I visited them for the first time when I was twenty-three years old and since then, they’ve never let me go. Can you understand that? There are so few things left in the world that we don’t know. Science has explained everything away. And yet here we have one of the last, great mysteries. A whole desert filled with drawings that nobody understands. It’s my sole ambition to solve the mystery before I die.

“And the fact that you should walk into my life – right now – just three days before Inti Raymi. You come with your extraordinary story and maybe what you’ve told me will finally unlock everything. I’ve been waiting for this for more than thirty years. So I mustn’t quarrel with you. You have to let me think about what you’ve had to say.”

“Inti Raymi,” Richard muttered.

He was remembering what the Inca had said.

Before the sun had risen and set three times…

“That’s right, Mr Cole. That’s the one thing we do know. We have less than forty-eight hours. At midnight, two days from now. That’s when the gate is going to open.”

They drove out as the sun began to set. Professor Chambers was behind the wheel. Richard was next to her with Matt, Pedro and Atoc in the back of the soft-top jeep. They were planning to go off-road, but it was uncomfortable enough already. The vehicle had rock-hard suspension, which meant they felt every bump and crack in the road. Although the windows were closed, dust came in underneath the roof flaps and it was often hard to breathe. The engine was deafening and made the seats vibrate. It was like travelling in an oversized washing machine.

“I’d much rather do this by day,” the professor shouted. “But all things considered, it looks as if we may be a little short of time. And anyway, we may find it easier to sniff around without plane-loads of tourists buzzing over our heads every ten minutes.”

“Won’t there be guards?” Richard asked.

“There are meant to be. But there’s never enough of them and the ones who are out here will probably be asleep. Anyway, I have a special permit to go into the desert… which is more than I can say for Mr Salamanda! If I’d found him or his people tramping over the lines, I’d have had his guts for garters – and I don’t care how important he thinks he is.”